first impressions, and these are mostly true.

In the body of the synagogue men came late. Under one gallery was a
school of boys, in the charge of a graybeard, who, book in hand,
followed the service with one eye, while he admonished perpetually the
boys to keep still and to listen. The boys grew restless; it was tedious
to them--the Voice which expressed so much to the stranger who knew no
Hebrew at all was tedious to the children; they were allowed to get up
and run into the court outside and then to come back again; nobody
heeded their going in and out. One little boy of three, wrapped, like
the rest, in a white Talleth, ran up and down the side aisle without
being heeded--even by the splendid Beadle with the gold-laced hat, which
looked so truly wonderful above the Oriental Talleth. The boys in the
choir got up and went in and out just as they pleased. Nobody minded.
The congregation, mostly well-to-do men with silk hats, sat in their
places, book in hand, and paid no attention.

Under the opposite gallery sat two or three rows of worshipers, who
reminded Francesca of Browning's poem of St. John's Day at Rome. For
they nudged and jostled each other; they whispered things; they even
laughed over the things they whispered. But they were clad like those in
the open part in the Talleth, and they sat book in hand, and from time
to time they raised their voices with the congregation. They showed no
reverence except that they did not talk or laugh loudly. They were like
the children, their neighbors,--just as restless, just as uninterested,
just as perfunctory. Well, they were clearly the poorer and the more
ignorant part of the community. They came here and sat through the
service because they were ordered so to do; because, like Passover, and
the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Fast of Atonement, it was the Law of
their People.

The women in the gallery sat or stood. They neither knelt nor sang
aloud; they only sat when it was proper to sit, or stood when it was
proper to stand. They were like the women, the village women, in a
Spanish or Italian church, for whom everything is done. Francesca, for
the moment, felt humiliated that she should be compelled to sit apart
from the congregation, railed off in the women's gallery, to have her
religion done for her, without a voice of her own in it at all. So, I
have heard, indignation sometimes fills the bosom of certain ladies when
they reflect upon the fact that they are excl